Smith, Simon (2014) the Books of Catullus. Phd Thesis. Http
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Glasgow Theses Service Smith, Simon (2014) The Books of Catullus. PhD thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5133/ Copyright and moral rights for this thesis are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Glasgow Theses Service http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] The Books of Catullus translated by Simon Smith Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of PhD in Creative Writing School of Critical Studies Faculty of Humanities University of Glasgow October 2013 2 Abstract The Books of Catullus consists of a completely new translation of Catullus’s poems divided into the three ‘books’ some scholars have agreed is the right order of the poems. These ‘books’ are divided as book one 1-60, book two 61-64, book three 65-116. This main text is prefaced by six essays: ‘Starting Line,’ ‘The Flâneur: Catullus, Martial, Baudelaire, Frank O’Hara,’ ‘Catullus and Modernism,’ ‘The Question of Voice in Catullus,’ ‘The Accessibility of Catullus,’ and ‘Sourcing the Origin: Translations of Catullus since 1950’. The essays together have an aesthetic of their own, reflecting what I take to be the most important features in ‘the books’ of Catullus: the key feature is a flâneurist wandering. The essays are speculative and diverse in their enquiry, and are not only representative of the ‘matter’ of thought which was going on behind the translations, but also represent the ‘form’ and circumstances that that thinking took place in. So the essays wander through and around questions relating to the gaze, collecting, ‘occasion’ and voice, the modern and Modernism, the contemporary, accessibility and difficulty, coterie and the evolution and practice of translation itself, in general, and in relation to Catullus in particular. If the essays wander (and wonder) in these ways, as a flâneur might conduct his perambulations, they also reflect the ‘form’ of the ‘books’. The poems are anchored by metrical form, they ‘wander’ around, through and across other possible categorical orderings as diverse as genre (lyric, elegy, epigram, hymn, translation, verse-letter, ‘epyllion,’ etc.); theme (love, loss, friendship, rivalry, marriage, adultery, politics, sexuality, etc.); length (the poems vary in length from two lines to in excess of four hundred), and so on. George A. Sheets in his essay ‘Elements of Style in Catullus’ (Skinner 2007, 190) sums up the poems in this way: ‘the single most characteristic aspect of Catullan “style” is its protean character’. Other epithets can be added: quotidian, contingent, exploratory, speculative. The essays, therefore, reflect this ‘protean character’ of the poems in how they address the reader: they can be chatty, informal, formal, comical, serious, academic, intellectual (and intelligent), playful, precise, digressive, ‘occasional,’ accessible, difficult, ‘modern’ – all rich characteristics of the poems – in short the art of the poems can be found in the expression of the essays. 3 Contents page Introduction 5 Starting Line 5 The Flâneur: Catullus, Martial, Baudelaire, Frank O’Hara 23 Catullus and Modernism 42 The Question of Voice in Catullus 55 The Accessibility of Catullus 63 Sourcing the Origin: Translating Catullus since 1950 69 Book 1 80 Book 2 141 Book 3 168 Works Cited 229 Editions and Commentaries 229 Translations 229 Other Works 231 4 Author’s declaration The essays on Catullus and the translations of Catullus’s poems are my own work. 5 Introduction Starting Line The Books of Catullus consists of a completely new translation of Catullus’s poems divided into the three ‘books’ some scholars have agreed is the right order of the poems. These ‘books’ are numbered as in Thomson’s Catullus: Edited with a Textual and Interpretative Commentary (1998): and divided as book one, 1-60, book two, 61-64, and book three, 65-116. This main text is prefaced by six essays: ‘Starting Line,’ ‘The Flâneur: Catullus, Martial, Baudelaire, Frank O’Hara,’ ‘Catullus and Modernism,’ ‘The Question of Voice in Catullus,’ ‘The Accessibility of Catullus,’ and ‘Sourcing the Origin: Translations of Catullus since 1950’. The essays together have an aesthetic of their own, reflecting what I take to be the most important questions in ‘the books’ of Catullus: the key feature of these ‘books’ is a flâneurist wandering. The essays are speculative and diverse in their enquiry, and are not only representative of the ‘matter’ of thought which was going on behind the translations, but also represent the ‘form’ and circumstances that that thinking took place in. So the essays wander through and around questions relating to the gaze, collecting, ‘occasion’ and voice, the modern and Modernism, the contemporary, accessibility and difficulty, coterie and the evolution and practice of translation itself, in general, and in relation to Catullus in particular. If the essays wander (and wonder) in these ways, as a flâneur might conduct his perambulations, they also reflect the ‘form’ of the ‘books’. A modern equivalent, a metaphor perhaps, for the collection of the poems into their ‘books’ might be Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, where he collects diverse materials into ‘convolutes,’ and Catullus’s ‘books’ might be seen themselves as ‘convolutes,’ in this case, a discrete (and discreet) ordering by metrical forms only without the orderings of narrative or chronology – orderings contemporary readers might be more used to. Although the poems are anchored in this way by metrical form, they ‘wander’ around, through and across other possible categorical orderings as diverse as genre (lyric, elegy, epigram, hymn, translation, verse-letter, ‘epyllion,’ etc.); theme (love, loss, friendship, rivalry, marriage, adultery, politics, sexuality, etc.); length (the poems vary in length from two lines to in excess of four hundred), and so on. George A. Sheets in his essay ‘Elements of Style in Catullus’ (Skinner 2007, 190) sums up the poems in this way: ‘the single most characteristic aspect of Catullan “style” is its protean character’. Other 6 epithets can be added: quotidian, contingent, exploratory, speculative. The essays, therefore, reflect this ‘protean character’ of the poems in how they address the reader: they can be chatty, informal, formal, comical, serious, academic, intellectual (and intelligent), playful, precise, digressive, ‘occasional,’ accessible, difficult, ‘modern’ – all rich characteristics of the poems – in short the art of the poems can be found in the expression of the essays. So, to begin with an anecdote. I started translating Catullus in June 2000, by accident. At that time I worked as librarian at the Poetry Library in London. One Friday afternoon I received a query at the reference desk, which triggered what soon became an obsession. Someone phoned asking about locating an English translation of Catullus’s Poem 8, and I reached for Guy Lee’s parallel text from the OUP edition (The Poems of Catullus 8-9). As I was reading Lee’s version down the telephone for the caller to scribble the text, I looked over the Latin and saw ways that I might substitute certain words in Lee’s text, which seemed, at least to my mind, to read more fluently, even though the actual words were not a literal ‘fit’; they seemed more in the spirit of the original. On and off as the afternoon meandered by I carried on working, turning lines and alternatives over in my mind, scribbling down the more promising phrases and even complete lines into a notebook. I took the fragments home and continued to work on them over the weekend. I quickly realised I had created my own very different version to Lee’s. I also realised I had a new poem, which worked very much as one of ‘my own poems’ worked, yet featured many different and quite uncharacteristic qualities. In this poem I was looking at the world through the eyes of another writer, and trying to find solutions in English to writing problems through a different sensibility, and quite a different culture. Already I was looking at the problem of writing a poem from quite an other, ‘outside,’ view to the one I was used to: in fact, more radically still, I had started to find another way to write poems, and a fresh way to see the world, paradoxically using poems two thousand years old, as a prism to find something new, something original to say. The experience was startling, exhilarating even. With some excitement I began work on other poems by Catullus, as it became evident that I must find a new or at least different method by which to proceed. So, I set off up the Charing Cross Road with a flâneurish swagger, visiting every second-hand bookshop as well as Foyle’s and Blackwell’s. Soon I had accumulated a large number of other translations, critical monographs, books relating to other aspects of Roman culture contemporary with Catullus, and 7 most importantly scholarly commentaries. (These are listed in the ‘Works Cited’ at the end of this thesis, which inform both these essays and the poems translated). Other gaps in the bibliography were filled in using the then new invention of the World Wide Web, with the help of various online booksellers, and later, libraries. What had first gripped me with excitement in ‘Poem 8’ was the sense, by way of the poet’s use of everyday language, and colloquial address of the reader, that here was an Ancient poet with a modern sensibility.